Inflating by simply printing more money, however, is now considered old-fashioned. For one thing, it is too visible; with a lot of high-denomination bills floating around, the public might get the troublesome idea that the cause of the unwelcome inflation is the government’s printing [p. 179] of all the bills — and the government might be stripped of that power.

The business cycle arrived in the Western world in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was a curious phenomenon, because there seemed to be no reason for it, and indeed it had not existed before.

Almost everyone, regardless of ideology, agrees that there is something terribly wrong with the accelerating, runaway welfare system in the United States, a system in which an ever-increasing proportion of the population lives as idle, compulsory claimants on the production of the rest of society. A few figures and comparisons will sketch in some of the dimensions of this galloping problem.

Does the modern welfare state really help the poor? The commonly held notion, the idea that has propelled the welfare state and maintained it in being, is that the welfare state redistributes income and wealth from the rich to the poor: the progressive tax system takes money from the rich while numerous welfare and other services distribute the money to the poor. But even liberals, the great advocates and abettors of the welfare state, are beginning to realize that every part and aspect of this idea is merely a cherished myth.

What, then, can the government do to help the poor? The only correct answer is also the libertarian answer: Get out of the way. Let the government get out of the way of the productive energies of all groups in the population, rich, middle class, and poor alike, and the result will be an enormous increase in the welfare and the standard of living of everyone, and most particularly of the poor who are the ones supposedly helped by the miscalled “welfare state.” [p. 163]

Unfortunately, the recent trend — embraced by a wide spectrum of advocates (with unimportant modifications) from President Nixon to Milton Friedman on the right to a large number on the left — is to abolish the current welfare system not in the direction of freedom but toward its very opposite. This new trend is the “guaranteed annual income” or “negative income tax,” or President Nixon’s “Family Assistance Plan.” Citing the inefficiencies, inequities, and red tape of the present [p.

Until the last few years there were few institutions in America that were held more sacred — especially by liberals — than the public school. Devotion to the public school had seized even those early Americans — such as Jeffersonians and Jacksonians — who were libertarian in most other respects. In recent years the public school was supposed to be a crucial ingredient of democracy, the fount of brotherhood, and the enemy of elitism and separateness in American life.

While current educationists do not go as far as the Ku Klux Klan, it is important to realize that the very nature of the public school requires the imposition of uniformity and the stamping out of diversity and individuality in education.